


Alone Again

by treefrogie84



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Background Relationship, Between Seasons 7 and 8, Depressed Sam, Gen, Psychic Sam, sam hit a dog
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-19
Updated: 2017-12-19
Packaged: 2019-02-17 03:24:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,612
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13068102
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/treefrogie84/pseuds/treefrogie84
Summary: Sam jackknifes out of bed, cold sweat gluing the sheets to him, thrashing his way back to consciousness. Panting, he rubs a hand across his face, frowning when it comes away bloody. He gets up, has a glass of whiskey, and goes back to bed. It’s a nightmare, it has to be. Dean is dead, exploded with Dick.





	Alone Again

**Author's Note:**

> This entire thing is the fault of the lovely folks at Mediocre Meta. You know who you are. What was supposed to be an angsty two paragraph headcanon turned into... this.

_Dean leans against a tree, breathing harshly, arm held tightly to his chest. His head jerks towards some sound and he winces, pushing off the tree and running into the darkness. Something howls after him, crashing through the undergrowth._

Sam jackknifes out of bed, cold sweat gluing the sheets to him, thrashing his way back to consciousness. Panting, he rubs a hand across his face, frowning when it comes away bloody. He gets up, has a glass of whiskey, and goes back to bed. It’s a nightmare, it has to be. Dean is dead, exploded with Dick. A nightmare amalgamation of dozens of hunts. That’s all it can be.

He downs an extra cup of coffee in the morning, swallows down some painkillers, and ignores it. Pushes himself through another day of car repair, wishing the entire time that Dean was there to tell him that he’s doing it wrong. 

Days later, crashed out in a shitty extended stay motel, a battered and broken dog curled up at his feet, the second one is clearer. Dean loping through the woods, constantly checking over his shoulder, battered and bloody, carrying a weapon Sam’s never seen before. 

That one is harder to explain away as a nightmare, but he denies that it could be anything else. The dog painfully hops up next to him on the couch that night, keeping vigil with him. He watches the night pass and the sun rise with a bottle of whiskey on his other side. He’s late that morning, stumbling over the threshold with its devil’s trap and salt lines.

It keeps happening, night after night. The nightmare visions get clearer all the time. Waking him up with migraines he thought were long gone, unable to keep anything down. He’s careful to never mention them to Everett or his dad, goes out of his way to avoid them the morning after if it was particularly bad. Their family has enough trouble, he doesn’t want to bring them more.

It’s just as well that he has the dog to look after. He’s pretty certain he’s hallucinating at least some of the time, the same unreality he’s spent so much time with. If it was just him… well, the desert’s not that far away. What’s a few more hallucinations?

So far, the nightmares and visions are all about Dean hunting in a horror world. As long as that remains the case, he can handle it alone. Not that he’s sure who else he could call even if he can’t-- all their friends are dead after all. He reads Bobby’s journal a couple times, thumbs through Dad’s and Dean’s, thinks about his. 

Does nothing.

The visions start coming during the day, when he can’t avoid them, can’t pretend they’re something else. For brief moments between waves of pain, he prays to a god he’s sure is gone, face buried into the dog’s side, terrified that even this might be too much, that angels might track him and…

Even if angels find him, or demons, what can they do that hasn’t already been done? His brother, his best friend, Bobby-- everyone he’s ever given a shit about is dead.

It’s not healthy, he needs to see someone. Visions of his brother fighting for his life day in and day out, nearly flooring him with the migraine every time, but he welcomes it anyway. If Azazel is back, if Ruby is back-- and really, what else could cause this?-- it’s an enemy he can fight, something he can chase after and hunt and _hurt_.

But no matter how hard he looks, there’s nothing. No demons, no gaping open gates to hell, no sign that the dead aren’t. Gradually, he stops looking, lets that part of the world pass him by. The phones go silent one by one, either dead batteries or folks think he’s dead too. He can’t bring himself to pick them up to find out which. 

Eventually, they’re just another hallucination too, random ringing where there shouldn’t be any.

He lifts the Impala on accident, trying to coax the dog out from under it. He overhears Everett’s worries about his dad and has no idea if they were verbal or not. The angry vet lady doesn’t charge him for the dog’s care after he mutters under his breath “Or, ya know, since you’re sticking me with a dog, you could _not_.” He avoids going near the plants in the office or the rosebushes after Everett complains about the dead leaves that litter the office.

It’s all coming back, even the skills he never had, and with no reason. He’s losing his mind _again_. After clawing his way back, stone by fucking stone, it’s all gone, washed out to sea, the cornerstone gone. 

And in its place, a nightmare built on sand and bone. 

Night after night, he dreams of Dean stalking through a monsterous landscape, demanding answers and his angel, tracking Cas. Constant combat, not even trusting the trees to have his back. Sometimes there’s someone else there, sometimes not. Always fighting. 

Sam pushes through the migraines, the sudden appearance of other abilities/curses, does his job, takes care of the dog. 

Nothing really changes when Amelia decides he _might_ not be a white supremacist serial killer. She names the dog, Riot, thinks it’s shameful he hasn’t after two months. The tequila goes down smoother than the whiskey, telekinesis easier to handle when he’s so trashed that it is the only way he makes it back to his room, his new touch of death doesn’t matter when they’re both dead inside already.

Living in close quarters, there’s no way she can miss the migraines. But she doesn’t push, knows better than to question the triggers, the ticks. The military must have warned her, somehow, that what comes back from war isn’t the same person as before. Even though he never served in any capacity she’d recognize, can never explain to her what is happening…

His life is full of things he ignores: His visions, the way he can read Amelia’s mind sometimes, picking up a broken ice maker to fix the compressor in back, the gaping hole in his chest where Dean and Cas and Bobby belong. Adding Amelia’s second thoughts, grief, whatever to the list takes no effort at all.

He doesn’t remember his dreams that night, for the first time in months. It’s enough for him to think that maybe they’ve gone away again, maybe he’s back to being human. He has no idea what caused his powers to flare up again, but he doesn’t care either. Not until the phone call after dinner, the expression on Amelia’s face.

His powers are a cancer-- spreading and going into remission randomly, ruining his life. And he already knows not to question cancer, god never has a reason.

Even if Don wasn’t alive, he would have ended up leaving. He’s already watched one love die, he’s not going to stick around and wait for demons to catch up to a second. He walks out early the next morning, carrying nothing that he didn’t arrive with. His entire life, packed into a duffle and a backpack again.

The Impala dies somewhere south of Pueblo in his flight north. For the first time in years, his powers are useful, not terrible, when he shocks her back to life on the side of the road. He manages to limp her to an auto parts store. He still doesn’t know what he’s doing, but this is the sort of work that Dean taught him how to do once.

He tunes out the observers in the parking lot, the electricity jumping from his fingers, the wrenches that never quite hit the ground, regardless of how many times he drops them, the lust and questions he’s picking up from the other customers’ minds. They’re just tools to be used, to run away from Amelia and towards what is waiting for him in Whitefish. 

He doesn’t think about, asks for a double room north of Fort Collins, is too worn to bother to change after he notices.

The visions don’t come that night either, just vague foreboding. He touches the houseplant in the office by mistake, watches a leaf yellow and shrivel and die between being handed the receipt to sign and passing it back. 

There’s no one in the cabin, hasn’t been in nearly a year. It’s silently abandoned, molding food in the fridge, mice at home in the breadbox before they left too. 

Every where he looks, Dean or Cas or Bobby stare back at him, their images haunting him just as surely as their ghosts would. He can feel them, no idea if it’s a vision or some new psychic thing or just losing touch with reality again. It could be any, all, none. 

It’s the first time he’s broken down in tears all year.

A demon stumbles across him outside of town one afternoon, yelling about finding the boy king to replace the current regime. Old habits take over without him thinking, pulls the thing out of its meatsuit, destroys it before it has a chance to go tattle telling.

Spends the next twenty minutes puking as revulsion crawls over his skin. 

There’s been no visions (that he remembers anyway), no phone calls, not even an email. Yet somehow, he’s not surprised at all to walk into the cabin and tackled by a solid wall of aggressive muscle, demanding that he prove that he’s human.

Sam doesn’t allow the relief cross his face when he doesn’t react to holy water, or salt. Whatever is happening, there’s at least that. He’s at least that human. 


End file.
